I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Perry Anderson: How India took possession of Kashmir

This real achievement has, in what by now could be termed the Indian
Ideology, been surcharged with claims to a largely imaginary status: the
notion that the preservation by the Indian state of the unity of the
country is a feat so exceptional as to be little short of a miracle, in
the standard phrase. There is no basis for this particular vanity. A
glance at the map of the post-colonial world is enough to show that, no
matter how heterogeneous or artificial the boundaries of any given
European colony may have been, they continue to exist today. Of the 52
countries in Africa, the vast majority arbitrary fabrications of rival
imperialist powers, just one – Sudan – has failed to persist within the
same frontiers as an independent state. In Asia, the same pattern has
held, the separation of Singapore from Malaysia after two years of
cohabitation not even a break with the colonial past, of Bangladesh from
Pakistan enabled by external invasion. Such few sports of history
aside, the motto of independence has invariably been: what empire has
joined, let no man put asunder. In this general landscape, India
represents not an exception, but the rule.

That rule has, in one state after another, been enforced with
violence. In Africa, wars in Nigeria, Mali, the Western Sahara,
Ethiopia, Congo, Angola; in South-East Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia,
Burma, Sri Lanka. Typically, military force deployed to preserve
postcolonial unity has meant military government in one guise or another
in society at large: state of emergency in the periphery, dictatorship
at the centre. India has escaped the latter. But it has exhibited the
former, with a vengeance. It is now 65 years since Congress seized the
larger part of Kashmir, without title from the colonial power, though
with vice-regal connivance, in the name of a forged document of
accession from its feudal ruler, the assent of its leading politician
and the pledge of a plebiscite to confirm the will of its people. Having
secured the region, Nehru – the prime mover – made short work of all
three. The maharajah was soon deposed, the promise of a referendum
ditched. What of the politician, on whom now rested what claims of
legitimacy for Indian possession remained?

*

Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir as he enjoyed being styled, was a
Muslim leader who, like Badshah Khan in the North-West Frontier
Province, had been an ally of Congress in the years of struggle against
the Raj, and become the most prominent opponent of the maharajah in the
Valley of Kashmir. There his party, the National Conference, had adopted
a secular platform in which local communists played some role, seeking
independence for Kashmir as the ‘Switzerland of Asia’. But when
partition came, Abdullah made no case of this demand. For some years he
had bonded emotionally with Nehru, and when fighting broke out in
Kashmir in the autumn of 1947, he was flown out from Srinagar to Delhi
by military aircraft and lodged in Nehru’s house, where he took part in
planning the Indian takeover, to which he was essential. Two days later,
the maharajah – now safely repaired to Jammu – announced in a backdated
letter to Mountbatten, drafted by his Indian minders, that he would
install Abdullah as his prime minister.

For the next five years, Abdullah ruled the Valley of Kashmir and
Jammu under the shield of the Indian army, with no authority other than
his reluctant appointment by a feudatory he despised and Delhi soon
discarded. At the outset, Nehru believed his friend’s popularity capable
of carrying all before it. When subsequent intelligence indicated
otherwise, talk of a plebiscite to ratify it ceased. Abdullah enjoyed
genuine support in his domain, but how wide it was, or how deep, was not
something Congress was prepared to bank on. Nor, it soon became clear,
was Abdullah himself willing to put it to the test. No doubt acutely
aware that Badshah Khan, with a much stronger popular base, had lost
just such a referendum in the North-West Frontier Province, he rejected
any idea of one. No elections were held until 1951, when voters were
finally summoned to the polls for a Constituent Assembly. Less than 5
per cent of the nominal electorate cast a ballot, but otherwise the
results could not have been improved in Paraguay or Bulgaria. The
National Conference and its clients won all 75 seats – 73 of them
without a contest. A year later Abdullah announced the end of the Dogra
dynasty and an agreement with Nehru that reserved special rights for
Kashmir and Jammu, limiting the powers of the centre, within the Indian
Union. But no constitution emerged, and not even the maharajah’s son,
regent since 1949, was removed, instead simply becoming head of state.

By now, however, Delhi was becoming uneasy about the regime it had
set up in Srinagar. In power, Abdullah’s main achievement had been an
agrarian reform putting to shame Congress’s record of inaction on the
land. But its political condition of possibility was confessional: the
expropriated landlords were Hindu, the peasants who benefited Muslim.
The National Conference could proclaim itself secular, but its policies
on the land and in government employment catered to the interests of its
base, which had always been in Muslim-majority areas, above all the
Valley of Kashmir. Jammu, which after ethnic cleansing by Dogra forces
in 1947 now had a Hindu majority, was on the receiving end of Abdullah’s
system, subjected to an unfamiliar repression. Enraged by this
reversal, the newly founded Jana Sangh in India joined forces with the
local Hindu party, the Praja Parishad, in a violent campaign against
Abdullah, who was charged with heading not only a communal Muslim but a
communist regime in Srinagar. In the summer of 1953, the Indian leader
of this agitation, S.P. Mookerjee, was arrested crossing the border into
Jammu, and promptly expired in a Kashmiri jail.

This was too much for Delhi. Mookerjee had, after all, been Nehru’s
confederate in not dissimilar Hindu agitation to lock down the partition
of Bengal, and was rewarded with a cabinet post. Although since then he
had been an opponent of the Congress regime, he was still a member in
reasonably good standing of the Indian political establishment.
Abdullah, moreover, was now suspected of recidivist hankering for an
independent Kashmir. The Intelligence Bureau had little difficulty
convincing Nehru that he had become a liability, and overnight he was
dismissed by the stripling heir to the Dogra throne he had so
complacently made head of state, and thrown into an Indian jail on
charges of sedition. His one-time friend behind bars, Nehru installed
the next notable down in the National Conference, Bakshi Gulam Mohammed,
in his place. Brutal and corrupt, Bakshi’s regime – widely known as
BBC: the Bakshi Brothers Corporation – depended entirely on the Indian
security apparatus. After ten years, in which his main achievement was
to do away with any pretence that Kashmir was other than ‘an integral
part of the Union of India’, Bakshi’s reputation had become a liability
to Delhi, and he was summarily ousted in turn, to be replaced after a
short interval by another National Conference puppet, this time a
renegade communist, G.M. Sadiq, whose no less repressive regime
proceeded to wind up the party altogether, dissolving it into Congress.

Abdullah, meanwhile, sat in an Indian prison for 12 years, eventually
on charges of treason, with two brief intermissions in 1958 and 1964.
During the second of these, he held talks with Nehru in Delhi and Ayub
Khan in Rawalpindi, just before Nehru died, but was then rearrested for
having had the temerity to meet Zhou Enlai in Algiers. A troubled Nehru
had supposedly been willing to contemplate some loosening of the Indian
grip on the Valley; much sentimentality has been expended on this lost
opportunity for a better settlement in Kashmir, tragically frustrated by
Nehru’s death. But the reality is that Nehru, having seized Kashmir by
force in 1947, had rapidly discovered that Abdullah and his party were
neither as popular nor as secular as he had imagined, and that he could
hold his prey only by an indefinite military occupation with a façade of
collaborators, each less satisfactory than the last. The ease with
which the National Conference was manipulated to Indian ends, as
Abdullah was discarded for Bakshi, and Bakshi for Sadiq, made it clear
how relatively shallow an organisation it had, despite appearances,
always been. By the end of his life, Nehru would have liked a more
presentable fig-leaf for Indian rule, but that he had any intention of
allowing free expression of the popular will in Kashmir can be excluded:
he could never afford to do so. He had shown no compunction in
incarcerating on trumped-up charges the ostensible embodiment of the
ultimate legitimacy of Indian conquest of the region, and no hesitation
in presiding over subcontracted tyrannies of whose nature he was well
aware. When an anguished admirer from Jammu pleaded with him not to do
so, he replied that the national interest was more important than
democracy: ‘We have gambled on the international stage on Kashmir, and
we cannot afford to lose. At the moment we are there at the point of a
bayonet. Till things improve, democracy and morality can wait.’ Sixty
years later the bayonets are still there, democracy nowhere in sight.